'The Critic' (1963): Symbolic of junk!

"Could this be the sex life of two things?"

By 1963, Mel Brooks was 37 years old and a fairly well-known comedian and writer, even if he hadn't yet done any of the things with which we truly associate him today. Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein were all in his future then. But he'd written for a couple of crucial early TV sketch programs at that point in his life, namely Your Show of Shows and Sid Caesar's follow-up show, Caesar's Hour. Also, perhaps more importantly, Brooks had recorded three popular, well-regarded comedy albums with fellow Your Show veteran Carl Reiner. These LPs featured the duo's much-imitated "2000 Year Old Man" routine, in which Reiner would play an earnest interviewer and Brooks would play an impossibly old European Jewish man who had seemingly witnessed all of human history first-hand and was pretty blasé about the whole experience.

An ad for The Critic.

Meanwhile, by 1963, Connecticut-born filmmaker Ernest "Ernie" Pintoff was 31 years old and already making a name for himself with his then-ultra-modern cartoons, like Flebus (1957), The Violinist (1959), and The Interview (1960), which combined "hip" humor with jazzy, almost abstract minimalist artwork. The Violinist, in fact, had garnered Pintoff a BAFTA award and an Oscar nomination. Not too shabby. Clearly, like Brooks, Ernie Pintoff had established himself as a showbiz up-and-comer. As fate would have it, Pintoff finally won his Oscar when he collaborated with -- you guessed it -- Mel Brooks on 1963's The Critic. Half a century later, Brooks reminisced about The Critic when he was interviewed for the  PBS documentary Mel Brooks: Make A Noise. These were his thoughts on the origins of the short film:

"There was a brilliant guy, a cartoonist and sweet as sugar. His name was Ernest Pintoff, and he said, there was a guy called Norman McLaren who used to do films, beautiful films that were truly avant garde. I'm talking about late '40s, early '50s. So when Pintoff said to me, 'Look, I've got a good idea. You watch one of these films and just mumble to yourself.' I said, 'That's good.' I'll be this old Jew trying to make sense out of what I'm seeing. There's no better philosophical sound than a Jewish accent. If somebody's going to wax philosophically, he'd better have a Jewish accent, or he's going to sound like a dope. A Jew never sounds like a dope. Anyway, we made this little short and submitted it, and it won an Academy Award."

And deservedly so, since The Critic is a total delight, even today. There's not much to it, really, just some sprightly harpsichord music, various dots, blobs, and squiggles, and the cranky Semitic commentary of Mel Brooks' character, a 71-year-old Russian-American named Murray, who pays decent money to see a foreign film and feels ripped off when he is presented with meaningless modern art instead. Simple as it is, The Critic is an obvious predecessor to TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000, and writer-performer Kevin Murphy (the voice of Tom Servo from seasons 2 through 10) has acknowledged it as an influence. I wonder, too, if Woody Allen caught this film before making What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.

Within a few years, Mel Brooks would be writing directing and occasionally starring in full-length films of his own. Ernie Pintoff spent most of his career directing perfectly-ordinary, yet successful network television shows, including Kojak, Dallas, and The Dukes of Hazzard. He passed away in 2002. In any event, here is the film itself. Please do enjoy. "It must be some symbolism. I think it's symbolic of junk!"

About the time John Simon appeared on 'Saturday Night Live'

Simon says: Infamous critic John Simon lampoons his own image on Saturday Night Live.

The 1985-86 season of Saturday Night Live marked producer Lorne Michaels' somewhat uneasy return to the long-running program after a half-decade hiatus. Michaels' own skit-com, The New Show (1984), had bombed badly in the interim, so he agreed to return to his old job upon the departure of showrunner Dick Ebersol at the end of SNL's tenth season. Although he'd eventually turn things around in a big way, Michaels' second reign at SNL was anything but an immediate triumph.

For reasons known only to him, the returning producer loaded the cast with actors from John Hughes movies, including Robert Downey, Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, and Randy Quaid, none of whom were known for sketch comedy. (Remember that Quaid and Hall had worked together in the Hughes-scripted Vacation, while Hall and Downey had crossed paths in Hughes' Weird Science.)

During that tumultuous, critically-panned season, considered by some to be among SNL's worst, the show was once again in critical danger of cancellation due to flagging ratings and general lack of audience interest. Most of the newly-signed cast members were dutifully fired at the end of the year, but the ones who survived (including Nora Dunn and Jon Lovitz) would soon become part of perhaps the strongest ensemble in SNL history, buoyed by the addition of Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey the very next year.

SNL was on the verge of a Reagan-era renaissance, but that was hardly apparent during the blighted '85-'86 season. Back then, it looked the show had finally had it after 11 years on the air.

But even during those dark times, there were occasional bright spots. Case in point: a mock trailer for a film called Critic, starring Jon Lovitz as an incorruptible movie critic for a fictional newspaper called The New York Trumpeter. Yes, Lovitz portrays a New York film reviewer in the sketch, but there is otherwise no thematic connection to his familiar role as portly, disheveled loser Jay Sherman in the similarly-named animated series, The Critic, which aired nearly a decade later on ABC. No, in the SNL sketch, Lovitz portrays Victor LaSalle, an absolutely incorruptible critic whose steely, humorless demeanor shows just how seriously he takes his job.

While The Critic was a comedy about a likable bumbler, Critic (there's no "the" in its tersely-worded title) is presented as a tense, nail-biting drama in the tradition of Network and All the President's Men. There's even a touch of Citizen Kane in there, too, as the noble LaSalle bravely pans a movie financed by the same corporation that publishes his newspaper... and promptly loses his job over it!

The most unusual feature of Critic is a cameo by infamous Yugoslavian-born theater and film reviewer John Simon, who at the time was one of the most hated men in his profession for his scathing, often cruel critiques. Simon's "style" was marked by vicious personal attacks on actors, writers, and directors. Here, in the upside-down world of sketch comedy, Simon is a simpering, insecure wannabe who got into film criticism because he didn't have enough talent to make it in show business. Lovitz's character, the pompous, pipe-smoking LaSalle, looks upon him with utter contempt.

Critic is a high-concept sketch, and the audience doesn't quite seem to get it. They clearly don't know who the hell John Simon is, as his appearance generates no reaction whatsoever. The only big laugh in the sketch is a cheap fat joke at the expense of Roger Ebert, which to me is the only low point in the proceedings. While writing about his heavy Eastern European accent, Simon dished a little about his SNL appearance in a blog post from 2011:

"Certainly I sounded foreign enough to Lorne Michaels when I appeared on Saturday Night Live. It was a skit about a good critic played by Jon Lovitz, and a dishonest critic played by me. Chatting backstage, Lorne asked whose army I was referring to when I spoke of my military service. “Ours, of course,” I replied, feeling at that moment very patriotic. “How else do you think we could have won the war?”

Modest as always, John.